Scholarly record

THE SEARCH FOR AN APPROACH TO CZECH LITERARY HISTORY IN IGOR HAJEK’S CONCEPT

Karolina Slamova

Abstract

This paper focuses on the field of literary history in order to show what approach to the historiography of Czech literature was taken by the representative of Czech exile literary criticism, Igor Hajek. The context which Hajek entered during his study stays in the USA and Great Britain, and later in exile, was the reception horizon of the late 1960s, when the events of the “Prague Spring” attracted the attention of the West and turned attention to the Czech liberalisation movement, in which literature played a significant role. Hajek assumed the role of a mediator of the fundamental values of Czech literary production to the Western audience from the position of an expert in the Anglo-American cultural environment and Czech and foreign literary approaches. The specificity of his perspective is due to the fact that he tried to present the image of Czech national literature with respect to a non-Czech reader and that he aimed to clarify the main features of the development of Czech literature to international students and readers. The paper presents the conclusions of the analysis of Hajek’s literary-historical essays, which show that Igor Hajek relied mainly on the views of Arne Novak, a Czech literary historian and critic. The paper further assumes that Igor Hajek, due to his background in English studies, methodologically drew on some of the approaches that were being promoted in the West in his time and notes the connections between Hajek’s methods and the methodologies these approaches are based on.

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